The liminal spaces aesthetic traces its roots to a 4chan post from 2019. An anonymous user shared an image of a completely emptied-out HobbyTown store, showing nothing but yellow-toned walls, fluorescent ceiling lights, and damp-looking carpet6. A second user responded with a short creepypasta describing what would happen if you "noclipped out of bounds in real life," a reference to a video game glitch where players pass through solid walls4. The response described an inescapable maze of rooms with "the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms"4. This became The Backrooms, the single most iconic example of a liminal space.

The concept of liminality itself is far older. The word comes from the Latin "limen," meaning threshold3. Anthropologists and psychologists used the term for decades to describe transitional states, like rites of passage or periods between life stages3. But the internet took the academic concept and turned it into a visual genre7.

Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film *The Shining* is often cited as a precursor to the aesthetic. The Overlook Hotel, with its long empty corridors and cavernous ballrooms, maintained exactly the kind of suspended tension that liminal space images aim for6. The "mono-yellow" motif in The Backrooms directly echoes Kubrick's use of the same color palette4.

The COVID-19 pandemic supercharged the liminal spaces movement in a way few internet aesthetics have experienced. When real-world spaces like Times Square and major airports actually emptied out, the line between internet aesthetic and lived reality blurred7. Researchers noted that the pandemic "made people more aware of transitional spaces and the emotions they evoke"4.

Academic attention followed. Alexander Diel and Michael Lewis of Cardiff University published research in the *Journal of Environmental Psychology* connecting the unsettling nature of liminal spaces to the uncanny valley effect, typically applied to humanoid robots but applicable to architecture that looks almost-but-not-quite right4. Peter Heft explored the concept in *Pulse: The Journal of Science and Culture*, drawing on Mark Fisher's theories about eeriness and the "failure of presence" that occurs when expected activity is missing from a space4.

Mili Kyropoulou, an assistant professor at the University of Houston's College of Architecture and Design, explained to *Popular Mechanics* that "the human brain is wired to make sense of the world through contextual associations," and liminal spaces break those associations in ways that trigger cognitive dissonance7. MIT's Carlo Ratti added that this dissonance, while uncomfortable, "can also spark creativity"7.

The aesthetic influenced mainstream entertainment. Beyond the A24 Backrooms film in development and the Toho/*Exit 8* adaptation, the visual language of liminal spaces seeped into music videos, fashion photography, and advertising4. Related aesthetics like Dreamcore, Weirdcore, and Poolcore emerged as offshoots, each taking the core idea of familiar-yet-wrong spaces in different emotional directions4.